Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Shakespeare Stories

My family is moving out of an apartment into a house in ten days (thank the Lord - four Fehlbergs is a lot of personality for 700 square feet), and I spent a good bit of the weekend packing books. Good old Orhan Pamuk is right - while I was stacking and arranging the books into boxes, the covers did transport me back to the first time I read them. And it was great. I came across The Random House Book of Shakespeare Stories, and wham-o! I was twelve again, lingering over the pages and planning the brain-implodingly expensive theatre versions I would put on. (No fake flowers on the fairies, and immediate expulsion for any who could not manage to look graceful in flight and not, as I thought most actors did, like a bag of potatoes being heaved by a crane. I would have been the director from hell.) Being familiar with the re-written versions of the stories of Twelfth Night and Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream before I read the real plays was actually lovely. To sound completely pompous, it made them feel like better versions of good memories when I actually dove into the real deals.